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Remote and ineffectual shill

That dared attack my president

With that poor weapon, half-impelled,

Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held,

Unworthy for a tilt with men—

Your quavering and corroded pen;

Shill poor at Bed and worse at Table,

Shill pinched, shill starved, shill miserable;

Shill stuttering, shill with roving eyes,

Shill nervous, shill of crudities;

Shill clerical, shill ordinary,

Shill self-absorbed and solitary;

Shill here-and-there, shill epileptic;

Shill puffed and empty, shill dyspeptic;

Shill middle-class, shill sycophantic,

Shill dull, shill brutish, shill pedantic;

Shill hypocritical, shill bad,

Shill furtive, shill three-quarters mad;

Shill (since a man must make an end),

Shill that shall never be my friend.

No race, no people has ever been free from slavery, either as slave or as master. Every race and every people ever enslaved

became at every opportunity enslavers themselves: Greek enslaved by Greek in the time of Aristotle, black enslaved by black

since time immemorial in Africa and in the 19'th century, the American south. Slavery was never predicated on race except as

circumstances rendered it. Many of the vast number of slaves of ancient Rome were fair skinned, fair haired Germans and Anglo

Saxons.

The universal truth of slavery, that it has been throughout history one of the defining manifestations of human nature, has

been surpressed both by history and by that nature. The enduring myth that slavery was imposed on Africa by outside forces,

that it was introduced by the Portugese in 1444, is belied by the fact that slavery and the slave trade were ancient and

commonplace within Africa long before the arrival of any white slaver. (The trans-Sahara slave trade route between West and

North Africa likely had it's beginnings as early as 1000 B.C., hundredsof years before the Ethiopians, long enslaved by

Eygpt, conquered and gave to Eygypt its Twenty-Fifth Dynasty; hundreds of years before Homer wrote in the Illiad that half

the soul of man was lost when "the day of slavery" came upon him.

"Slavery was widespread in Africa," writes Professor John Thornton in Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic

World, 1400 - 1800, "because slaves were the only form of private, revenue producing property recognized in African law." To

the 'odehye' - freeborn - elite of West Africa, the outside forces of Europe, England and the Americas imposed no evil, but

merely presented a new market, increased demand, and lucrative new export opportunities that the indigenous powers welcomed

and readily exploited.

We bewail our past as slaves - experienced or ancestral, real or fancied - but never commemorate our enslavment of others.

Only circumstance seperates slave from master; and for much of history, freedom and the will to enslave have been one. The

oppressed in the blessing of their deliverance become the oppressors.

"The ox," said Aristotle, "is the poor man's slave."